How To Farm Ice! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 91]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you guys are having a good day today we’re starting off the episode in front of the two ice tunnels we created last time and as you will no doubt have seen in the last

Episode these things are incredibly fast we’re gliding on packed ice using a boat traveling hundreds of blocks in mere seconds and now I have got the portal set up at the far end of this that takes us out to the Badlands biome also the jungle biome and a mega taiga that are

Conveniently located around the same place but this thing could even be faster if we used blue ice instead of packed ice so that is part of what I want to get done in today’s episode the problem with that of course is that blue ice is a little bit rare it can only be

Found in iceberg biomes and not in such great quantities that I feel like tearing all of those icebergs down and harvesting them for tunnels like this this is a 500 block long tunnel there are approximately four stacks of packed ice blocks in this and four stacks of

Blue ice might be a little bit harder to come by than all of this luckily for us there are ways you can farm ice and then actually craft it into blue ice from regular ordinary ice so it goes through the packed ice stage and then crafting packed ice into blue ice

Is possible as well and that’s what we’re going to cover in today’s episode before we do that let’s actually take a look at the three different kinds of ice as they can be found in the wild starting off with our goal this right here is blue ice it is the slippiest

Form of ice has the least amount of friction on anything that is gliding across it whether that be a boat or an item or anything like that even a player or a mob has less friction on blue ice meaning that that is the optimal block to use for traveling high speeds using

The nether Hyperloop design that we’ve created already the problem with blue ice as I mentioned before it only generates in these iceberg biomes meaning that there are occasional dotted little clumps of blue ice here and there but these icebergs are actually quite beautiful it’s quite nice encountering

Them in the ocean and I don’t really feel like tearing one of these down just to get a handful of blue ice there is probably about a stack maybe a little bit more because the icebergs actually do go below so yeah there is there’s a decent quantity of blue ice in this particular

Iceberg we could tear it down if we wanted to but the fact that you can renew ice is kind of the reason I want to leave these icebergs as they are make them a kind of landmark make them a pleasure to float around maybe even make

Some kind of base out here in the long term if we wanted to make a Superman style Fortress of Solitude or something like that this is probably where we would come so while we might take a block of it here and there when we need to the majority of the blue ice

I want to get in this world is going to be farmed for that we will need packed ice and packed ice is what we’ve already been using in the nether tunnels it is kind of the the middle tier of ice as far as slip enos goes it has a little

Bit more friction than blue ice but a little bit less friction than regular ice it’s still perfectly feasible to use it in ice roads in the nether and you can use it for item transport and all kinds of other useful things not least because packed ice is everywhere I’ve

Torn down a significant chunk of an iceberg over there and it really hasn’t diminished the size all that much especially considering there are tons of icebergs all around us as we speak and 9 packed ice can be crafted into a single blue ice one other thing to note about

Packed ice is that these iceberg biomes aren’t the only source of it in fact icebergs these frozen oceans were only really added in the update aquatic in Minecraft 1.13 so before that there was a source of packed ice in a completely different biome which we haven’t

Explored yet in this series and I think I know where one is so I’m gonna go out and find it welcome to the ice Plains spikes biome one of the rarest and possibly most beautiful minecraft biomes out there these things are pretty rare you will quite regularly find them

Attached to snow planes but snow planes themselves are pretty rare if you found one of these then congratulations because they are really quite a sight to behold you have all of these little spires of ice and then these towering ones up here that kind of look like the

Empire State Building or some kind of giant torch or something like that it’s really quite special and as a result a lot of people used to try and preserve the beauty of these things as long as they could taking down some of these smaller ice spikes or maybe even the

Little frozen lakes that are around here but this was the source of packed ice until frozen oceans came to be and allowed you to harvest ice directly from icebergs out there in the ocean so I’m gonna leave this biome alone for now but it’s at least good to know where one

Of them is we’re about 2,000 blocks west and 3400 blocks north roughly and this thing stretches for quite a distance it’s not one of the largest biomes I’ve seen but it is definitely quite big so for whatever reason if we want to come back and build here could build a

Fortress of solitude here as well I don’t know why I’m stuck on this Fortress of Solitude idea but I don’t know just being around all of this ice kind of makes sense to me over here in the river we have our third and final form of ice and this is actually the one

That we’re going to be kind of home growing if you like this is just ice regular ice and it can be found in a variety of different places specifically where there are cold biomes like these snowy Tigers ice spikes or frozen rivers you won’t find it all that commonly in

Iceberg biomes actually I think a lot of the icebergs are just made out of packed ice occasionally you’ll find bits and pieces of this here and there but for the most part you’ll find it generating in a cold biomes in the rivers now with each of these types of ice it is

Important to make sure you have a silk touch pickaxe when you want to acquire it actually a sill touch tool of any kind doesn’t have to be a pickaxe of pickaxe is just the fastest and it can be broken quite quickly if you’ve got a silk touch pickaxe and you’re standing

On land obviously if you’re in the water it’s gonna take a little bit longer conduit power might help with that if you need to harvest a whole bunch of it from the water but for the most part just find a place to stand on land and

Then just harvest as much ice as you care to now you’ll notice that in the river here we’ve taken out a few of the water sources but the water sources will reform in a river and that is kind of the basis of ice farms because only water sources can be converted into ice

In cold enough conditions and the ice can actually reform in this river so we could technically speaking stand here wait for the ice to grow back and then harvest a whole bunch of it at once cut it back wait for the water sources to reform and start again note that if you

Break ice without using a silk touch tool it doesn’t drop an ice block but it does create a water source there and some people pointed out in the episode where I created the ink farm that bringing ice with me to create the water sources in the ink farm might have been

A slightly more elegant solution than placing all of the water sources from buckets and going down and refilling them every single time so having ice around can actually be incredibly useful technical purposes if you’ve got some regular ice on you you can create a water source pretty much anywhere except

For the nether without having to worry about carrying buckets in individual spaces in your inventory because much like other blocks ice stacks to 64 so carrying some ice around with you actually is quite a good idea not least because also we can convert it from regular ice in a crafting table into

Packed ice and then once we’ve got a decent amount of packed ice we can convert that into blue ice which we’re going to swap out in our ice roads in the nether but luckily for us players there is actually a way that you can farm ice without having to come out

3,000 blocks to the nearest frozen biome and you may remember that a while back when we were working on a certain project we encountered problems with ice forming where we didn’t really expect it to and that place is the iron farm notice how there are torches all around

The perimeter of this and remember back in episode 52 when we were placing the water it started freezing over if it wasn’t exposed to light and that is because we’re in a mountain biome above a certain elevation in mountain biomes you start to get snow forming like this

On open blocks when it rains and also water exposed to the open sky will start to freeze that’s above a certain elevation I’m pretty sure it’s about why it 92 so you’ll notice how the tops of these mountains around here are covered in snow these are the perfect conditions

For farming ice and all you need to do is set up effectively like a set of infinite water sources if you want like a two by two of water up there that’s kind of freeze over and will form infinite ice for you if you build it up

In a large enough area so we’re gonna sweep down to this mountaintop over here and I’m choosing this one because it’s fairly close to the spawn point it’s around the area that I usually work and this is kind of a place that will be loaded in quite frequently so it’ll give

Time for the ice to freeze over regularly we’re going to carve out a large enough area of this that we can create a decent sized ice farm I’m thinking probably 16 by 16 if we can which means we’re probably gonna have to dig down into the mountain a little bit

So it’s not to disturb the exterior of it too much but then I think we can start creating our first ice farm okay sixteen by sixteen felt a little bit large for this mounting table I thought we had a little bit more room to work with here but instead I went with

12 by 12 it looks discrete enough if we look at it from ground level you can’t really see all that much of it just a little wall of stone brick up there and obviously the iron farm behind it his kind of stealing focus a little bit

Anyway if we wanted to blend this in with the environment we can even make it into like an old mountaintop ruin or something like that but anyway now it’s time to discuss oh gosh there’s a pig in here of course there’s a pig in here it’s time to discuss exactly how we’re

Going to be farming the ice and look a little bit more into the physics of how ice forms up here and how we can use that to our advantage so to start off with I’m gonna place a diagonal line of ice blocks directly across the center of this square and thankfully because I

Built it as a square it works out of the perfect diagonal line it’s a little bit worried guys a bit worried so we’re gonna break this without using our silk touch tool and it’s going to form water sources now you’ll remember that if water sources connect side by side like

That they form new water sources and building a diagonal line directly it costs across a square like this with water sources that are coming from the ice it will actually fill up this entire area with water sources there you go reaches all the way to the corners and

You’ll notice that ice is already starting to form now for ice to form the water has to have access to the open sky and these water sources have actually blocked the water in the corner from turning into regular water there we go right so so yeah the water blocks will

Actually have to have access to the open sky in order to freeze into ice which means we’re gonna have to take down this tree because blocks like leaves like this above here will actually prevent sky access to it so maybe we should just trim it back a little bit I’m not sure

But like I said this is going to completely fill over with ice eventually now obviously for us to harvest the ice we want to use our silk touch pickaxe which is going to be fine for breaking out individual blocks like this and if you just want to harvest a little bit of

Ice you can always do that now but the problem is when this entire thing is frozen over with ice when it’s going to be optimal to harvest it all the problem is the water sources aren’t going to immediately reform so we have a couple of options now we could place

Strategically placed light sources around this which would prevent the ice from forming in the first place and melt it if it did form this is a little bit more difficult to control because of the precise light level ice blocks need to form and break back into water sources you need a light

Level of 12 or above to prevent water from permanently becoming ice I think at light level 12 it kind of revert back and forth from ice to water again like the light will actually kind of heat it up once it’s formed into ice and cause

It to break but then that’s not going to necessarily be the best option for this because it involves taking out a decent chunk of the area that would become ice and then the water sources would have to flow together the diagonal line down the middle is kind of the most efficient way

Of having the water sources reform another alternative would just be to harvest all of the ice in here and then go back through and place the water sources in manually either by breaking ice blocks like we just did or placing a whole bunch of buckets in here but again

That seems like a little bit more trouble than it’s worth it seems like a little bit of a task each time we want to reset the farm so instead what we’re going to do is place a diagonal line of stone blocks up here I’m actually gonna

Use stone brick for this any kind of solid block will do even a slab or perhaps even like leaf blocks as long as it blocks light I think it may even be possible to do this with glass because I think this isn’t necessarily dependent on like the transparency of the block

The ice actually needs direct sky access to form from a water source and so by placing a diagonal row of blocks across this you basically have a guarantee that the water underneath those blocks is never going to form into ice and what that means is the water sources

Underneath those diagonal blocks will be preserved notice that I haven’t placed them in the water I’ve placed them one block above the water and the shadow that’s being cast here indicates that the ice will not form underneath those blocks so every time I clear out the ice

From either side of this farm all of the water underneath here is going to flood back out and is going to reform water sources like it just did when we placed the ice blocks in the first place to demonstrate I’m gonna hang out here until all of this ice has formed on

Either side and then we can clear all of that out harvest the ice and watch the water sources refill Well one thing’s for sure I definitely need to pick proof this place better they’ve been nudging me around while I was waiting for all of the ice to form and this little C shape over has finally started to fill in I don’t know why that was taking so long

I don’t think there’s much in the way of like anything blocking this and yeah I think it’s probably just a quirk of Minecraft randomly deciding which of these blocks to fill in with ice and you’ll notice that it doesn’t do it in any kind of like pattern it doesn’t

Start to freeze from the edges and the the other ice blocks next to these are not kind of encouraging the water sources to freeze over it’s not like the ice kind of spreads so much as it just randomly chooses blocks to replace with ice I think over here some of the ice

Blocks underneath here formed before I put the stone bricks in there or had decided to form and it was just kind of taking a while to catch up or something so underneath here I am actually going to have to break that block there and then place another water source in here

So that we can definitely have this working but then all I need to do is go around with my silk touch pickaxe and break everything else in here except for the stone bricks that are covering the center and you’ll notice that once we break away all of the blocks around the outside this

Entire thing has reformed into water sources which means now all we need to do is wait for it to freeze again and we get more ice to harvest and the same is totally true of the other side we can break out all of the ice from here like

So get rid of all of these pick it all up with the silk touch we have almost three two and a half stacks of ice yeah roughly about that probably we would have got two and a half stacks if I hadn’t broken some of the ones over

There manually but this is perfect this is a nice little ice farm and we’ll be able to get all of the ice we want from this realistically speaking if you want a massive yield of ice it’s probably best to go out to a snow Plains biome somewhere where there’s a nice wide area

Or somewhere where there’s a mountain that you don’t have to worry too much about clearing out and make either a massive ice field or a bunch of these smaller farms like this and that will work out pretty well for you you’ll still have to harvest the ice manually

You could even implement some sort of system where Pistons push it around a little bit if you want to but in this case the only a modification I’m going to make up here is just to raise the height of these stone brick blocks a little bit because regardless of where

The block is it doesn’t have to be directly above the water source it can be you know up to build height I imagine who can probably still place these blocks and it will still cover up those specific water blocks down the middle and no others it’s not like it casts a

Shadow to either side but by raising this up it just means we can walk around more freely under here when we are harvesting the ice so all of the water sources in the middle will still be present but we can just go through and take out the entire 12 by 12 square of

Ice at once instead of having to mess around hopping over this barrier in the center and now we have ourselves a nice farm and I can start converting some of this ice into packed ice well that’s gonna get me 17 blocks of packed ice and that’s 18 total because I had one left

Over from the iceberg and that’s going to get me precisely two blocks of blue ice now considering I said we needed four stacks of packed ice to fill out one of those single nether tunnels the one that leads out to the Mesa is about 500 blocks long and every alternating

Block is an ice block so that means we’re probably gonna need about 250 ice blocks in terms of blue ice that’s gonna take quite a while and I think this ice farm will probably be used for other things we’ll use the ice for other stuff and I might return to the iceberg biome

Take down a bit more packed ice and then craft that into blue ice in fact I already have a significant amount of that in my storage warehouse already that we can use but it’s good to know that ice is a renewable resource that can be farmed in large quantities like

This you’ll probably need ice at some point for technical projects like moving items around in water streams we’ve done that already with the squid farm and that yeah ice is kind of useful it’s also a really nice aesthetic building block to have something with a bit of transparency but something which is not

Necessarily a glass block you have to worry a little bit about light placement when you’re placing ice as an aesthetic block but if you want to use it as Windows it makes for a really interesting texture it is connected by default so it doesn’t have those glass

Borders that are used to with glass and it can look quite good as a modern window obviously the blue ice and the packed ice are opaque you cannot see through those and they count as solid blocks as well so remember that mob spawning rules still apply however mob

Spawning rules as regards the regular ice it counts as a transparent block so I don’t think mobs can actually spawn on it so by converting all of the packed ice I’ve got in my storage system into – ice we might just about have enough to get the nether tunnel to the Badlands

Done I think we will definitely have enough if we just want to do the Guardian farm tunnel for now but that’s not a very long tunnel so I think packed ice will probably do for that one I think we’ll have nearly four stacks of blue ice when we come out with all of

This packed ice converted well more like three stacks and change I guess we’ve got three stacks of 64 there and one of 22 at the end which isn’t going to completely cover the nether tunnel out to the Badlands but it’s going to be a very good start and we can always run

Out to the icebergs get a little bit more packed ice to convert and use the rest of that but that is gonna be it for this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you’ve enjoyed this little look at ice farming and you’ll be happily farming ice in your own survival

World worlds as well don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I will see you guys soon take care bye for now You